Tag: opportunity a sugar baby story

PICTURED: Jacqueline, Sasha, and Olive cuddling in a hotel bed after an impromptu hotel-room three-way.

Sasha

Sasha might not have been originally envisioned as the character who would go on to become the protagonist of BP Games’s next title, but it’s not hard to see how we got there. Sasha exudes Main Character Energy, bursting into Opportunity with probably the most going on of any of the secondary characters. She’s a cosplayer! She’s also a popular streamer and internet personality! She’s got a bunch of weird messy roommates! She’s got pronouns AND blue hair! She does a little >:3 smile! How could Pacha and I NOT want to spend more time getting to know her?

Functionally, Sasha came about as a character when I realized that since the anime convention Jackie and Olive were attending in chapter 5 was all about Jackie reconnecting with one of her youthful passions, it made sense for that reconnection to be personified by a younger woman who might remind Jackie of herself. It also gave me someone to put into cosplay of an off-brand Nanami from Revolutionary Girl Utena, which was important because Nanami is my favorite character from that anime by a wide margin. Finally, it gave us a fresh face to add to sex scenes in chapter 5, which felt appropriate given that chapter 4 hadn’t seen any new additions to the cast. Although the cast was PROBABLY large enough that we could have managed without her, Sasha wound up bringing out new facets of Jackie, Olive, and Rose during their respective scenes together, so I consider her to be a very successful late addition indeed.

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 6: The Rest Of The Cast” →

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PICTURED: Splash art from Opportunity of Juniper encouraging Jacqueline during a workout.

Juniper

My intention when setting out to produce Opportunity was for Jacqueline to be supported by a pair of her best friends: Olive and Juniper. In the finest traditions of fictional trios, if Jacqueline was our Fairly Average One and Olive was The One Who Is Short And Round, it naturally followed that Juniper would need to be The One Who Is Tall And Thin. I had originally planned for Olive and Juniper to have roughly equal prominence in the story, but things didn’t really work out that way – Olive wound up enjoying much, MUCH greater prominence than originally envisioned, while I think Juniper unfortunately fades into the background somewhat. In some ways, I think this perhaps mirrors the three women’s friendship. Yes, it’s true that Jacqueline, Olive, and Juniper are a group of three best friends, but I think they all privately understand that Jacqueline and Olive are the capital-B capital-F Best Friends in the equation.

(Reminder: significant plot spoilers to follow below the cut!)

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 5: Juniper, Rose, and Kate” →

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PICTURED: Earliest piece of Roman’s concept art, showcasing what would become his default look for the first three chapters, plus some sample facial expressions.

Roman

Being far and away the most visible of the story’s two straight male characters, and the only one who gets any presence in sex scenes (sorry, Clayton), Roman bears a lot of responsibility across his broad shoulders.

A lot of things about Roman as a character were approached from the angle of specifically considering a type of frustrated-straight-Millennial-woman wish fulfillment. Roman is older than Jacqueline (44 to her 32), old enough to convey a sense of maturity and wisdom, but not so old as to put him far beyond the age range that women identifying with Jacqueline might consider dating (and not so old as to make his sexual stamina feel unbelievable). He’s wealthy, but not to an absurd, unimaginable degree, and his wealth came to him at least partially via his own ability (all of which soothes the conscience of anyone dating him). He’s gentle, kind, and respectful of Jacqueline’s boundaries – but can be assertive when it’s hot for him to be so. Despite his fabulous wealth, Roman isn’t a sleazy playboy or weird grindset hustler or an anti-aging-mumbo-jumbo freak – he’s sort of a dorky homebody whose primary hobby is fixing up old transistor radios (while also being tall and muscular with a great head of hair). A lot of what makes Roman Roman has been fine-tuned to make him into the sort of sugar daddy where someone could look at him and say “well… if it were HIM, I suppose I wouldn’t mind…”

(Reminder: significant plot spoilers to follow below the cut!)

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 4: Roman, Olive, and Olive’s Family” →

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PICTURED: Pieces of concept art for Opportunity’s main character Jacqueline, showcasing some facial expressions and a few early takes on her baker’s uniform.

Jacqueline (Jackie For Short)

Jacqueline is a character borne from a confluence of many intersecting anxieties I was experiencing when first setting out to work on Opportunity: anxiety about the ever-increasing cost of living, anxiety about rising Puritan fascism, anxiety about social isolation, anxiety about aging, anxiety about my own sexual desirability, and anxiety about how uncertain and unfriendly the future looked amid an ongoing pandemic. I suppose it follows that she wound up being a pretty anxious person herself.

A lot of what I think people find true or relatable about Jackie was really just me trying my best to represent the real-world struggles of my friends who were mothers. Going back to the previous entry in this series, the real-world setting again does a lot of the conceptual heavy lifting here: everyone knows that, in our society, mothers have it rough. A mother is an amalgam of several highly-skilled jobs, none of them paid. A mother is a teacher and a counsellor, a mother is a cook and a maid, a mother is an accountant and an event planner. And that’s all before getting into the increased challenge of being a single parent with a full-time job to boot! Put all of that together and you’ve got a character who is tired, stressed, tired, experiencing guilt from a half-dozen different directions at any given time, tired, more than a little sexually-frustrated, and unimaginably tired. A character, in other words, who is desperate to make a change.

(I’ll just put a reminder here before the break: this series contains spoilers about the plot of Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story! You’ve been warned!)

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 3: Jacqueline & Her Family” →

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PICTURED: An piece of splash art from Opportunity’s first chapter.

THE INITIAL CONCEPT

There are two things you should know before I explain where the idea for Opportunity came from. The first of them is this: at the start of 2020, Pacha and I were still working on our previous project – an erotic sci-fi vehicle about a school for mech pilots called As Above/So Below. As fond as we were of the concept and the characters, we’d also been grinding away at it for over three years without much more than a demo to show for it and we were both getting pretty burnt-out. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit at the start of 2020, that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin, as it left me thoroughly brainbroken for several months and the thought of continuing to struggle with AA/SB while I was trying to keep it together in the middle of a global pandemic was unthinkable.

The second thing you should know is that for several years up to this point, I had been nursing an absolutely TERMINAL crush on a good friend. She was, unfortunately for me, happily married to a frankly excellent dude, and also had two small children.

The more observant among you may start to see where this is heading.

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 2: Concept & Themes” →

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PICTURED: Opportunity’s main menu screen.

INTRODUCTION

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write, at length, about the experience of making some form of creative project. This stems from a life misspent poring time and time again over such indispensable self-commentary works as The Art of Discworld, Steven Universe: Art and Origins, and, most treasured among them all, The Calvin & Hobbes 10th Anniversary Book. There’s something so seductive to me about holding forth on all the little decisions you made, the things that influenced you, the experiences that shaped your creation… while I wouldn’t necessarily say that this desire is my sole or even primary creative driving force, I also can’t deny that it’s a significant contributor.

The only inconvenient thing is that in order to indulge this long-held desire to write a bunch of preening autobiographical fluff where I talk about how clever and creative I am, I first had to actually MAKE something that I’m proud of and that could bear this kind of extended scrutiny. So I did! It’s called Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story!

Here’s some quick at-a-glance facts about Opportunity:

  • Opportunity is a pornographic kinetic novel about sex work, romance, parenting, and Millennial ennui. It released on Steam and Itch in February of 2023.
  • I did all of the writing, programming, and assorted managerial tasks, while all character sprites and sex scene artwork was created by the pseudonymous artist Pacha.
  • The first chapter of Opportunity released on Itch in late February of 2021. It was about 20,000 words, had only two sex scenes, and took about an hour to play if you read slow.
  • After catching the eye of boutique pornographic games publisher TinyHat, we released chapters 1-3 on Steam Early Access in March of 2022, with chapter 4 coming in August of that year.
  • The full, final, 5-chapter version of Opportunity is over 140,000 words long, takes 6-10 hours to read end-to-end, and features nearly 400 sex scene CGs.
  • Opportunity is the second project Pacha and I worked on together, the first being the as-yet-incomplete mecha-themed visual novel As Above/So Below. It will soon be followed by our third large-scale project, the mind-control-breaking isekai sandbox visual novel Monstrous Liberation.

This will be a series of essays exploring the themes, influences, characters, and philosophies contained within Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story. I hope that it proves interesting not only to fans of the game, but also to people who might want to know about my creative process and personal motivations for making Opportunity! (As this series will inevitably discuss plot spoilers, each one will consist of a short spoiler-free introduction followed by a read-more divider.)

To begin with, let’s take a look at some of the other creative works that shaped my approach to developing Opportunity.

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective: Part 1 (Intro & Inspirations)” →

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PICTURED: Splash art from Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story showing main character Jacqueline coming upon her daughter Aster and Aster’s babysitter Shruthi engaged in a game involving cat ears and makeup.

The following is an essay that I wrote in June of 2023 on Cohost. It was intended to mainly function as a value-add for a plea I was making at the time for people to purchase and review Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story on the various platforms on which it retailed, but it wound up being one of my favorite pieces of writing I’d done on that site. The piece focuses on two core pillars of Opportunity’s narrative that tend to receive disproportionate amounts of attention: its queerness (which tends to get downplayed) and its wholesomeness (which tends to get overemphasized). What I’d like to do here is first reproduce the essay in its entirety, and then in a brand-new section talk about what, if anything, has changed since I wrote it, while also expanding on some points I only briefly touched on.

To begin with, a quick refresher on what Opportunity is about:

With two young children, a full-time job, two student loans, and rent due every month, it’s no wonder that millennial single mother Jacqueline is struggling! She’s exhausted, she’s stressed, she’s overworked, and worse: she hasn’t gotten laid in over two years! But things begin to change after she reconnects with an old friend, who makes her a surprising offer…

Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story is a warm, lighthearted erotic visual novel exploring what it means to rebuild and reinvent yourself against a backdrop of late-stage capitalism. What do you do when you realize you haven’t been really happy for a long time, and what does it mean to be REALLY happy, anyways?

Continue reading “Opportunity and the Bona Fides of Queerness & Coziness (Expanded)” →

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